Polymer fibers have been used in numerous medical applications. For example, sutures can be made of polymer fibers, such as non-biodegradable polymers. Fibers can also be woven or meshed to form wound dressings, tissue engineering matrices, gauzes and bandages, and drug delivery devices. In a drug delivery device, a drug can be encapsulated with the polymer and released by diffusion and/or degradation. These polymeric fibers often have diameters of 50 micros or greater, many in the range of hundreds of microns. They can be limited by the inflexibility of the materials they are formed of.
Nanofibers with diameters in the nanometer to low micron range can also be obtained from polymers. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,235,295 discloses such polymeric nanofibers for tissue engineering and drug delivery.
Nanofibrils made of organic polymers are of considerable interest in the scientific community and in industry for a range of technological applications (for example, Huang et al., 2003, Sill and von Recum, 2008), however, each of the existing polymer nanofibrils or nanofibers has limitations. Thus, it is an object of the present invention to provide an improved polymer nanofibril and method of making the same.